cs lab5 keynote 3 - advocacy for change...cs lab #5, keynote #3: advocacy for change (transcript)...

CS Lab #5, Keynote #3: Advocacy for change (Transcript)

Co-organised by: With the support of:

This is the transcript of the live Keynote #3: Advocacy for change session that

took place on June 5, 2020 as part of CS Lab # 5, co-organised by XTRAX and

Circostrada.

Speaker: Michael Hoar, Independent Consultant

Chaired by Maggie Clarke, Director of XTRAX

Transcript:

LAURA: Hello, everyone, and a warm welcome to all of you on this third and

final day of the fifth edition of the CS Lab. I'm Laura Jude and I am the

international projects officer of Circostrada talent network. Today it is finally my

turn to open one of the keynote sessions after my colleagues, Stephane and

Laura. And I am really excited and happy to do so and learn with you through

what is our very first digital experience.

I don't know how many of you attended the first two sessions, but I did, and it

was really inspiring so I am very much looking forward to today's conference,

which will address the issue of advocacy for change. After four editions hosted

between France, Italy and Latvia for the most recent one, we were supposed to

go to Manchester in April to enjoy the famous warm and beautiful weather of

England but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were forced to adjust our

initial plans. So together with XTRAX, who is a member of the Circostrada

Network and also the co-organiser of this year's Lab, we decided to reframe it

and to adapt it to the current situation, hence the following thread on

leadership in times of crisis.



I also want to take this opportunity and express my gratitude to Michael Hoar

for being so understanding, flexible, receptive with regards to all the changes

we have asked him to make when we took that decision. The process of

adapting the CS Lab, we decided we would strive to achieve the same

objectives which are first to encourage self-critical assessment, to propose a

forward-thinking approach to become change-makers, to reconnect with our

own creativity, to question what is stopping us from becoming a fully inclusive

sector and how to make sure everyone is included and last but not least to

advocate effectively for our work.

Before I give the microphone to Anaïs from XTRAX I want to take a few more

seconds to either refresh your memory or get you up to speed on what

Circostrada Network is. So Circostrada is the European network for circus and

street arts and it is supported by the created Europe programme of the

European Commission and the French minister of culture. It is co-ordinated by

the French National Centre for Circus and Street Art Theatre based in Paris and

the network is made out of more than 120 members across 35 countries in

Europe and beyond. The main goals of the network are to build sustainable

futures for circus and street arts, to support professionals, to create content

internationally and to spur innovative ideas and projects within these two

communities.



If you are interested in knowing more about who we are and what we do, you

can obviously check our website, and you can also follow us on social media.

We have Facebook, Twitter and a brand-new Instagram. You can also register

to our newsletter, or simply write us an email, or even call us. So I wish you a

really fantastic session, and I give now the floor to Anaïs from XTRAX.

ANAÏS : Thank you, Laura, thank you. And hello, everyone. Thank you so much

for joining us in this final keynote session on the topic of advocacy. I hope that

you managed to attend our other two keynote sessions which addressed the

topics of leadership in times of crisis and developing inclusive leadership

practices. The recording for the discussion on leadership is now available

online, so you can check the Circostrada and XTRAX social media, and we'll also

pop the link in the chat, and the recording for yesterday's keynote will be made

available today.

My name is Anaïs Biaux is I am the Creative Development and Partnerships

Manager at XTRAX. We are a Manchester-based development organisation for

outdoor arts and our main three areas of work include - we are the managers of

Without Walls. Without Walls is the largest outdoor arts consortium in the UK

and we work alongside 36 partners and festivals. Our second focus is on

international relations, and we do this through Platform for UK, which is a

strategic programme designed to support the international promotion and



export of UK outdoor artists. Finally, we offer services in event programming

and we also deliver a range of training opportunities for artists and festivals.

We are also the managers and producers of As The World Tips by Wired Aerial

Theatre. We would like to thank the Arts Council of England for their ongoing

support.

I'm pleased to say that we have 75 people joining us today and before

introducing today's speakers I would like to remind you of a few practicalities.

First, the session will last 45 minutes. Please feel free to use the chat to say hello,

who you are and where you are from. For access purposes, and also

acknowledging that English is not the first language for many of our listeners

today, we have enabled captions for this keynote. So to activate your captions

you can click on the 'closed captions' button there should be at the bottom of

your screen. If you would like to ask questions to the panellists - and we

encourage you to do so - please use the Q&A function. Please feel free to

comment, post or tweet using the hashtag #CSlab5 and follow XTRAX and

Circostrada on our social media channels as we will be sharing links to the

recordings as well as publications and other resources.

I would now like to introduce you to today's topic which is on advocacy for

change and how to advocate effectively for greater recognition and support.

So to address this session, and this topic, we're joined by Michael Hoar, an

independent consultant with 25 years' experience in the arts and cultural



sectors, and Maggie Clarke, director of XTRAX, will be chairing the session. A

warm welcome to you both. Thank you so much for taking part. I will now hand

over to Maggie to kickstart the conversation and I hope that you find this

session to be very useful. Thank you.

MAGGIE: Thank you, Anaïs , and hello, everybody. My name is Maggie Clarke

and I am the director of XTRAX and I am delighted to introduce you to this

session with Michael Hoar. Michael is an independent consultant with 25 years'

experience working in the arts and cultural sectors and his experience combines

academic knowledge with an understanding of real-world practice in the arts,

cultural and creative industries. He has substantial experience of lecturing at

several British universities, as well as the University of Cairo, and has delivered

many learning and cultural strategy programmes working with local, regional

and national government bodies, as well as Arts Council England.

He works with a portfolio of clients, including arts and cultural organisations,

universities, local government, charities, and independent professionals,

delivering bespoke responses to organisational and strategic development

challenges, including business planning, strategy development, fundraising,

board development, and advocacy and influencing, which is the topic of our

discussion today. Michael, you are very welcome, and you have the floor.



MICHAEL: Thank you, Maggie, thank you, Anaïs, and thank you, Laura. Yes,

hello to everyone. I'm going to now switch to sharing my screen, so if you just

bear with me a moment. Hopefully you can now see my slides. Well, yes, I'm

talking about the topic of advocacy. I think that, right now, a lot of organisations

- probably many who are listening here today - are thinking about how they

make the case for their art form and their organisation. We might feel that we

struggle to have street arts and circus arts taken seriously and recognised at an

institutional level or a governmental level, and we might feel that we're going

to fall further behind as a consequence of the fallout from the virus. So how do

we lead, how do we get ourselves in the driver's seat, and get more leverage

so we maintain, and hopefully advance, the position of our sector and our

organisations?

But how to do it - because the context is hard - and what do we want to

communicate and express right now? Now, I recognise that there is lots of

different organisations here today listening in, with different needs, different

sizes, different contexts. So some of what I say perhaps will be familiar to some

of you, and some will be new. But I hope I'll provide an interesting perspective

to people whose activities are advanced in advocacy. I won't provide hard and

fast answers, but I will offer a way of thinking and a perspective on how you can

do this.



I would just say at the beginning that advocacy, to me, is a little like looking

after and tending a garden - it takes nurture and care, and it can overgrow, and

sometimes it'll feel that it's not delivering the results that you want at the speed

you want. Rather, it's delivering on its own timetable. But if you apply some of

the lessons I'm going to talk about today, you will get results - I guarantee, you

will get some results.

So, first of all, on my first slide here, you can see I'm trying to draw a distinction

between advocacy, activism, advising and lobbying. And advocacy takes place

on the outside and is often seen as more evidence and science-based.

Activisms can be more confrontational. Again, it's from the outside, but it can

involve more direct acting. And then lobbying, which is sometimes confused

with advocacy, but they're certainly close bedfellows but it often takes place

more on the inside, as does advising over here. But advocacy, literally, its origins

as a word go back to the old French and to Latin, being called to the aid of one

another, or being called to the aid of another. Literally, 'to advocate' - 'ad' is

‘to’ and 'vocare' is ‘to call’. Or it might be a verb - to plead in favour of. But it is

a deliberate strategic effort to create and bring about social and policy change

through support for a particular course of action. I'll repeat that - the deliberate

strategic effort to bring about social and policy change through a particular

course of action.



I tend to find, in arts organisations, this is just something we're often expected

to just get on with, without much - perhaps without much training and without

much thought. It's often rolled into the day job. But I've seen in my work really

good advocacy carefully planned yield big results on a local, national and - on

a national and international level, when it is backed up by evidence. But we are

probably all doing it at different times and in different ways. I'm going to put

forward a simple system for you to kind of draw upon and hopefully get into

action with quite quickly.

So, how to think about advocacy? Well, it's many activities - it's organising,

campaigning, trying to influence people's thoughts and perspectives,

gathering and commissioning research, calling on powerful agents, and calling

and co-hosting meetings with other agencies and organisations, developing

joint plans and strategies, and capacity-building a family of advocates, as well

as engaging the media and newer forms of media like social media. It is a

continuous process when it works well. The advocacy stream is always running

- I would always say that the game is always on. And national through to local

results are achieved on an ongoing basis all of the time.

Many of us are doing it with greater or lesser degrees of focus and strategic

planning. Someone said to me recently that they couldn't do advocacy because

they felt it was an obscure art, a dark art of some sort, going on behind the

scenes, but I think we can bring advocacy into the light and I think with a few



kind of core lessons, we can all do it and adopt it. Your leadership style and

your personality, perhaps relating back to some of the things Hilary talked to us

about earlier in the Lab, are really, really important. Some people's personality

styles and leadership styles naturally lend themselves to advocacy and others

have to apply more thought and apply different tactics and learn these skills.

Some people talk about reactive and proactive advocacy. Proactive advocacy

would be something that's deliberately planned, maybe aligned or shaped

within a strategy, and perhaps rolled out over a longer period of time - maybe

one, two or three years. Reactive advocacy, which often does take place in crises

- and I've seen examples of it in the current crisis - takes place when people

kind of react very rapidly to a particular set of events, and these things can be

successful - sometimes they can be unsuccessful and have more unpredictable

results. But I'll talk more about that later on.

There are in terms of the context, I think it's really, really important to make sure

there are lots of nationalities represented in the participants today. It's really

important to make sure you understand your national context, your government

plans to unlock after the lockdown. What are the national arts and cultural

sector priorities in your country, or in your place? Are they things that you want

to align with, or are they things that you want to challenge?



But I think there is a powerful narrative that the outdoor arts, circus arts, street

arts sector can mobilise, because the outdoor arts sector has a unique power

to mobilise and to help people celebrate, and also it'll take place in, often in

outdoor spaces, usually in outdoor spaces. So the potential for kind of social

distancing and reconfiguring how events take place is great. But also there may

be a very significant role in helping people come to terms with this crisis, and

also reimagine what the future could be like in local places, and there is a

unique power for outdoor arts in doing this.

I think there is a narrative there that we can draw upon and your organisations

can draw upon. Clearly, there's also playing a significant role in economic

recovery and social and community reconstruction. There will be a role to help

places come to terms with what has happened, but also to help restart and

kickstart the economy in local places, as outdoor arts pulls people into places

and helps boost prosperity. There's a lot of sensitive timing that will need to be

thought through. There's lots of uncertainty. So your advocacy plans will need

updating regularly and you will need a very flexible strategy at this time and

also you'll need a mix of platforms, because at the moment a lot of advocacy

will take place online.

But what I've learned is that we can all do it. I've been involved in lots of

advocacy actions over the years, and it's something that, like I say, with a few

simple lessons, it is something we can all adapt and begin to do. We don't need



to be frightened of it or embarrassed about it - it is a normal part of democracy.

It is a democratic function or a function of democracy. It is a normal and

legitimate part of that work. And politicians and officials in public organisations

and in businesses, they expect it, and they're just people trying to do a job, like

we are, and we need to present them the case and the evidence and the story.

We also need to be flexible - being influential in advocacy often means, to me,

being open to being influenced as much as it means being influential. Good

advocates are flexible and dynamic and can shift and move across agendas

rapidly and they aren't dogmatic. Like I say, most people who I've worked with

in other organisations are really happy to meet with me, or meet with you,

especially if you are expressing how what you are doing will help them deliver

their plans. I'll say that again - especially if you're expressing how what you are

doing with your organisation will help them deliver their plans. The art of

advocacy is positioning yourself as a resource to others. It doesn't matter if

you've done a lot or a little of advocacy - start where you are. Begin with the

resources and the contacts and the partnerships and relationships you have.

But one thing you will need to do, if you are working with partners in different

sectors - say, in economic development, health and wellbeing, planning, local

government, business or with partners in place and place-making, is that you

need to become familiar with the policies and the concerns of those partners.

You are not trying to put one over, or get an advantage, on somebody -



advocacy for me is based on showing the partner, or the person you are trying

to influence, the win-win - the thing that they can do that you can do with them

that's going to provide a win for both of you.

It really helps to know that person's policy area, but also, if they are politicians,

their particular interests and political views - how they've voted in certain

elections. Knowing the facts about their work is important. You'll also need to

craft a story and know what it is that you're effectively trying to communicate

about your work and your organisation. And also, crucially, what you need from

them and from that advocacy engagement. And then your planning will need

to be very dynamic - I find that advocacy planning needs to be much more

dynamic than many other areas of planning. Because once you enter into an

advocacy activity, event or engagement, frequently quite unpredictable

opportunities can emerge to extend that advocacy and grow it and stretch it

and develop it further. So you need to be ready to respond. And it's about

building real long-term relationships. It is about connecting with people. You

need to find consultations that are taking place in your local area, or within your

sector, that might have a bearing on what you do.

I can't underestimate the importance of being proactive and calling meetings

with partners and putting yourself in the driver's seat and in a leadership

position. It depends on who you are encountering but it is good to put together

what I call 'set piece' one-off events where you can kind of leverage a



relationship with a powerful agent or partner and stretch that leverage and what

you can get from that event as far as you can. Being part of a coalition, or a

collective, of people influencing against a single goal is good, and there are

many at the moment, national and international, for instance, campaigns and

hashtags I've noticed. But particularly if you are a small organisation or an

individual, you might want to think about if your interests are best served by

joining with or triggering the formation of a partnership.

The other thing I would say is, like, make it core. When you are doing your

business planning, alongside your marketing plan and your financial plan and

your risk assessments and your equalities plan, either produce a separate

advocacy plan or have specific advocacy actions in your main action plan. Make

it second nature. I'm surprised how often organisations don't do this. And then

the other thing that's important is sensitive language and communication. It's

really, really important to make sure that you are thinking really carefully,

especially as you make initial approaches to organisations and individuals, that

you use sensitive language.

You are sharing the idea of how we can look at something, how we can come

together to make a case about something, how we can contribute to the local

community and the place. I'd like to come together with you in a meeting to

think about how we explore that together and look at what we can do to build

that role, perhaps of outdoor arts or the arts in a local strategy or plan, or in a



regional strategy or plan, or even a national one. But sensitive language and

communication - I spend hours and hours of my time redrafting communication

and emails with potential people I want to influence or work with an

organisation to influence. I think there is a huge amount written about advocacy

online and I took this opportunity to read some of that and there's a lot written

about advocacy, and there's quite a lot written about arts advocacy. Some of

it's good, some of it's less helpful. But what I've tried to do here for your

situation is draw together what I would all six steps to advocacy, really. And if

you try and follow these steps, I think you'll get ahead.

The first step is to prepare a plan of some sort. Now, this can either be a full

strategy, if you are a larger organisation or in a partnership working on a bigger

campaign. So this would be typical for a campaign with a national impact. And

that would have an overarching goal, it would have strategic objectives - and

you can find all sorts of strategic advocacy planning canvass and all sorts of

things to help you with that and there are examples of this online. You might

have strategic objectives for kind of 1-3 years. Or you might just do something

much more simple, if you are thinking about, you've got more limited resources,

you are a smaller organisation, you might be working on your own in place but

you might just have a simple plan which has a simple action plan with some

simple objectives to it. But don't be fazed by that.



The next thing you need to do, really, is what I would describe as assemble your

team. Who are the advocates? And the first thing - it might be just you as an

individual. I think most advocacy actions are perhaps best taken forward in

partnerships and groupings, but if you are an individual and you've kind of got

to do certain things for your organisation, perhaps, more than for a sector, then

you might just be working on your own. However, I think it's more likely that you

will want to work with what I would call an organisational team and this could

be quite broad - it might be you, it might be your staff, it might be board

members, it might be volunteers or friends of the organisation, or it could be

other powerful agents like patrons. But it's important to assign roles to

everybody.

The next thing you could do to assemble your team, really, is either join or form

a wider partnership, which I've talked about already. I think a lot of arts

organisations really benefit from doing this and I've seen frequently partners

beyond the arts take the arts more seriously when a collection of six, seven,

eight, nine, ten organisations come together in a local place, for instance, and

then are able to express that, collectively, we have this economic and social

impact. Whereas I think it's more difficult for some of the smaller organisations

to get the ear of perhaps a politician or an economic development agency or a

business.



Once you've created your plan and assembled your team, you next thing to do

really is to map your influence. And I'm surprised how often people fail to do

this systematically, and you want to be thinking in terms of, who do you know

or have contact with in local government or national government, whether that

be politicians and elected officials or it might be civil servants. It might be, who

have you got contact with in the arts sector in your place or nationally or

internationally? It might be the broader public sector - again, in economic

development, health and wellbeing, planning, regeneration, local government.

It might be in local businesses who could support your case and cause. And

then it also might be in the voluntary and community sector. But also

remember, when you are mapping your influence, think about the six degrees

of separation that people often talk about - who do you know that knows that

person that would help introduce you, or help you reach that person? Or have

a conversation with that person? And this is where your powerful board

members or patrons or perhaps friends of the organisation could come in to

help because very frequently, I find, when you are working in partnerships,

somebody always knows somebody who can get to that senior person.

Once you've done that mapping of your influence, it's useful just to think about

what are the gaps, and, as I said, how you can plug some of those gaps using

contacts of your contacts. The next thing you need to do, really, then, and

everybody talks about this in all the toolkits and guides online, is really about

creating the case, and I think there's several elements to this. I think the first

one is, a lot of advocacy is about facts and figures and data and evidence, and



we've become better and better at this in the cultural sector over the last sort

of 10-15 years, and this might be research that you've commissioned, but it

might be research that you're gathering from other places, or it might be

research you are co-commissioning with other organisations. But I think it's

critical to start a resource bank or an information bank within your organisation.

It might just be a folder or file on your shared drive where you gather relevant

facts and figures, evidence, data and information, and also reports and policy

documents in one place.

Your case also needs to have qualitative elements. This is the story or the

narrative or the symbolic value of what you do and this could be something

where you start to perhaps talk about the human interest, what your

organisation achieves for a place or for a set of people or a community group,

or for the economy. Then also you might want to think about, crucially, how

your work aligns with economic and social and cultural policy locally, regionally

or nationally. And you want to be able to express that and articulate how what

you do meets the broader agendas of the partners you want to influence in a

place. And then crucially, you perhaps want to think about your ambition for

your organisation. I think it's really important, when you're going into thinking

about advocacy, that you clarify where you want to take your organisation to

and how you express that in the case that you make. Because you might want

to articulate and express your ambition in the context of how you want to deliver

in the future for other organisations. And you'll need that case to have different

versions - you need a long version, you might want a case study version, you



might want a really short version so if you meet somebody unexpectedly who's

important you can kind of tell them about your organisation and its work, just

in a few sentences.

But you might have - you might be creating, as I say, case studies, it might be

an infographic, which is a sort of diagram with facts and figures nicely presented

on one page. It might be it's a video. It might be - it might include photography.

It might even include artistic work and be creative. It might have narrative prose

in it. It could be a creative act. And then, once you've created your case,

probably working with your partners, perhaps on your own or with your

organisation, you then want to get into action and there's probably three areas,

really, that it's helpful to think about when you are thinking about advocacy.

One of them, which is probably the area that I've done the most work in is kind

of direct contact with politicians, public bodies, and public servants and

officials, funding bodies, businesses, faith leaders, the education sector, the

health sector, initiating direct contact. And I think you can be doing this through

online, through online letters and emails, but also organising and co-hosting

and hosting 'set piece' meetings or one-to-one meetings. It might even be

commissioning research together. Commissioning activity together. And you

can really be creative here and take this as far as you want, but if you have

perhaps a visit from someone senior from another organisation that others

might be interested in meeting, it's a really, really good way of attracting the



attention of local politicians, public officials at senior levels, businesspeople,

and you can perhaps co-host a roundtable discussion about the role arts and

culture can play in the kind of post-COVID-19 world and talk about how you

might want to work on that together. It is a very kind of favourite technique of

mine and it can go very far and you can kind of stretch and lever as much as you

can from that visit from that particular person. But there's lots of ways of doing

this, and as I say, you can be as creative as you are able to. You will also want to

engage with their consultations of those kinds of people. So have they got

public consultations and town hall events that you can go to and make the case?

Perhaps speak at some of those events, or just at least turn up and make contact

with senior people - make yourself visible.

Also, obviously, social media can be important there in terms of engaging with

those officials and we've seen that happening a lot during the lockdown. And

of course this work right now can be face-to-face, as well as - it can be online as

well as face-to-face. There's nothing to stop you organising Zoom meetings

with local partners or local partners in the place to talk about how we can kind

of build support for and build the impact of outdoor arts in the post-COVID

world.

The second area of activity which I think you would probably want to think about

is how you mobilise what I would call a family of supporters. So this would be

the public, board members, it might be friends of the organisation through



friends schemes, champions, advocates, volunteers and patrons, and perhaps

it would be very typical for you to bring groups of people together and ask

people what they want so that they can better advocate for your organisation

and the area of work that you represent. And there's lots of ways of doing that

- you can do group meetings, you can do it online, you can form newsletters

and so on. But it is very, very helpful to mobilise a family of advocates, especially

if you are a smaller organisation. And then the third area of activity which I think

is really, really important is just connecting to a wider audience, which you can

do through social media and through traditional media. OK, and then clearly

you just need to do, learn and adjust, change tactic as you need to, horizon

scan for new consultations, and review your activities monthly, at the moment,

because it's going to be a very dynamic scenario as you start to advocate - new

opportunities will be presented to you - and you will probably need to refresh

the message, too.

So finally I would just say keep it simple, especially if you are new to it, take

small steps. Work online at the moment and think about face-to-face activity

and contacts later. You are in this for the long haul. It is a marathon, not a sprint.

You are trying to build long-term relationships, and be prepared that the pace

of progress may seem uncomfortable at times. Sometimes advocacy doesn't

deliver results quickly. And you'll find that you sometimes feel like, "Why am I

doing these things, I'm not getting any traction with anybody" and then

suddenly you will find that other people are mentioning you in their work, they



are adding you to their strategies, they are inviting you to their meetings and

they are shouting about you in senior levels at work or in the organisation.

And now is the time to think about who your influential contacts are. I'm very

surprised people are very careful about when they mobilise their patrons and

their influential contacts but think about it because I suspect, probably, for

many of you, the time is now. OK, and now I'm going to stop sharing my screen

and I'm going to take some questions.

MAGGIE: Well, thank you, Michael, there was an awful lot to think about there

but I think you laid out very clearly some steps that we can all take and things

that we can all think about in building our own advocacy plans and I did like the

sense that you're giving us of, this is something we can all do. It is not

mysterious, we can all do it, and that is very empowering, I think, especially as

many of us are part of small organisations and, as we know, many of us are

sitting alone with our laptops and are away from many of our colleagues.

There's a couple of questions that I think are coming through, but one thing

that I just want to ask you - as I'm sure you know, Michael, many organisations

in the arts are quite small, and they have very little money and not a lot of

resources. What do you think should be our priorities, if we are a small

organisation, and what can we do if we have little or no money?



MICHAEL: Yes, that is a really good question and one that people ask a lot. But

I think probably the way to start, I would say, for a smaller organisation, is to

look around you to your peers and other organisations in the place. That might

be other arts and cultural organisations. They may not be outdoor arts

organisations. They may be other types of arts organisations. But to see

whether you can form coalitions with other organisations and maybe play a

small role in a larger effort. Having said that, there's a role for social media and

your digital - your phone is in your hand, and if you want to join campaigns and

use social media to make the case to local partners, it doesn't take a lot of time

and it can be a daily or weekly discipline to maybe tweet certain politicians or

tweet people or certain organisations. So that can be free and not take a huge

amount of time. But I would say for smaller organisations it is definitely

important to consider what role you can play in a bigger coalition.

MAGGIE: That's great, Michael, and I think it's really interesting that you have

talked a lot about how we need to work in partnership with others and maybe

that might be local partnerships of different arts organisations or partnerships

that span many cities or many countries, such as we have with Circostrada. Do

you have any thoughts about whether advocacy is something that you can do

by yourself, if you are in that situation where you are alone as an organisation,

or as a worker - can you do it on your own and how would you approach that?



MICHAEL: Yes, I think you can, but I think it's about calibrating the results that

you would want to achieve. I suspect that most of the time, unless you can

mobilise some powerful patrons or powerful agents on your behalf - and you

may be able to do that - then most of the time probably what you can achieve

alone will be lower than what you - less than what you can achieve in a bigger

grouping. But I think for me, I see it in the arts, is that it is everybody's

responsibility to do some of this because the importance of the arts drops off

politicians' agendas as administrations change and the Arts Council of England

will always say we have to re-present this work, the arts and culture and its

importance to the economy and national health and vibrancy, we have to re-

present it very frequently. And I think it's just part and parcel of our work and

we have to build it in - even if you are an individual, what small effort can you

make? And I think it is possible and if you are an individual, you can think about

what tactics you employ and you can think about the range of activities, and we

can all do something is my view.

MAGGIE: Thanks. Now, there are a couple of questions coming in from the

people attending here. One of them is around sector advocacy and I think

you've talked a lot about how we can work in partnership with others, but how

do you think we herd a whole sector when there may be many people that are

part of that sector who have a range of different opinions about exactly how

that should be done?



MICHAEL: Yeah, I mean, that is the million-dollar question! And I've found

myself on many occasions in a room full of a sector no local place or in a region

trying to do exactly this, and it's not easy. It needs skilful facilitation and

conversation. It needs careful planning. You've got to work through each of the

partners' challenges and issues. But broadly, I've rarely seen a failure when a

group of partners or a sector has set out to create an advocacy plan or create

greater impact for itself. But you've just got to be patient and you've got to

work through people's problems and challenges and you've got to sit inside

other people's shoes, you've got to stand in other people's shoes and look at

what their challenges and issues are and just try and find that win-win, the

middle of the Venn diagram of a set of priorities and a message that will work

for everyone. And my experience is that it can be done, but patience is

required. But if you do do that, and invest the time, you will get a bigger result,

and you'll get a more substantial embedded result, I would tend to find. That

would be my answer there.

MAGGIE: Thanks, Michael. I think we've got time for a couple more questions

that are coming through. Someone has asked whether you could give us an

example of a concrete outcome that somebody could reach for when they're

setting out to advocate for their organisation?

MICHAEL: Yes, so I mean I suspect that a lot of the work I've done and where

I've seen really concrete results and I have been really happy is when I've seen



the kind of case that I've helped another organisation or a partnership shape,

I've seen it appear in another organisation's policy or strategy document. So if

you're trying to make a case about arts or outdoor arts, and you're trying to

articulate, perhaps, how important that is for - perhaps the importance of it to

local economy or to community engagement, or community development, if

your work and the value of it and your partner's names appear in somebody

else's strategy or policy, and often it might be a regional strategy, but it might

be a city strategy or country strategy, if it appears somehow as you would like

it to appear in that strategy or policy, somehow that is to me one of the biggest

wins because it allows you to go back into that organisation as a place to talk

about how you make that feature of their policy a reality.

Then you're in a longer term relationship because you might be built into a

three-year strategy with someone and you can co-commission research, you

can bring resources to the table, you can match resources with the partner.

That, to me, is where you get substantial change happen over a period of time

and also you embed the value of the arts in kind of local planning and place-

making, and the same principles apply nationally and internationally, too.

MAGGIE: Thanks, Michael. I'm going to try and squeeze in a couple more

questions from our attenders today. Liz Pugh has asked whether it is helpful to

define our sector, and as you know we're talking here about the street arts and

circus sector across the whole the Europe and internationally, or is it better for



us to look at being part of a larger conversation advocating for the arts more

generally, rather than trying to distinguish our sector as special interest sectors.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

MICHAEL: Yes, I do. For my part, it's neither one nor the other, it's both things.

And I think it depends on the objectives in your advocacy strategy. Because if

you're making the case to a national arts council or perhaps the ministry for

culture, perhaps you do want to raise the volume on the importance of outdoor

arts, because they will already be aware of the importance of the arts because

they are the public body or the governmental department for that. So it might

be that you are focusing on outdoor arts and the role that it could play in post-

COVID-19 reconstruction. It could be a very, very interesting argument to make.

It's one I would think about.

But then, more broadly, perhaps if you're thinking about a local place or a

region or a city region, it might be that actually it makes more sense to make

the case with a series of other parts partners about the importance of arts and

culture in city or place-making. Because you might be making the case to

economic development agencies, and actually what they're going to be

interested in hearing perhaps might be what is your net worth as a sector? And

I've seen that happen in a city - a number of arts organisations came together

and were able to say to the local economic development agency and the local

government, together we generate £25 million over four years, but separately



it might be a lot less, and it's less likely that you are going to get to have a seat

at the table and a conversation at the table at that senior level.

MAGGIE: Again, it is about working together, isn't it? And I've got one last thing

and if you could answer very briefly. How would you say - would you have any

advice about how we could approach targets and key people in national arts

councils who so often change, and often seem less open to changing their views

and policies? It can be so hard to approach these figures. Ten seconds!

MICHAEL: Well, sensitive communication. Look for the win-win - what is the

thing they want that you can help them deliver through contact. That would be

my simple answer.

MAGGIE: Michael, thank you so much. Thank you to all the attendees who have

listened to us. I'm afraid we've run out of time and I'm going to invite Laura and

Anaïs to return to conclude the session with us.

LAURA: Thank you, Maggie, thank you, Michael, for this really empowering

session and for your approach on advocacy. I will definitely keep all the different

tools you gave us and, as you just told, we definitely have, as a network, a lot of

advocacy for change to do, so, yes, thank you for that. And thanks, Maggie, for

the great moderation.



ANAÏS: I just wanted to thank everyone, all of our listeners, for attending this

webinar. You can use the same link to join us for our wrap-up session this

afternoon, which is at 4:00pm, Central European Time and I'll also remind you

that a few questions will pop up as you exit this webinar so we kindly ask that

you take a couple of minutes just to give us some feedback. Obviously that's

very important for us in terms of making the case to run more sessions like this,

so thank you, again, to everyone, and to our wonderful speakers and we hope

that you will join us for our wrap-up session. Thank you.

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